Gallipoli by Ashley Ekins

Author:Ashley Ekins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Military General
ISBN: Gallipoli
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal (fourth from left), commander of the Turkish 19th Division, with Ottoman officers and staff of the Anafarta Group which he commanded from August 1915. Far left is Major Izzettin Bey, Kemal’s chief of staff who served with him in the operations during the allied August offensive. AWM P01141.001

But Kemal’s authority was limited to that of a divisional commander, and as such he was forced to make the best of the situation as he found it. His first reaction to the possibility of a new allied offensive was to deal with the newly extended front. On 4 June he transferred the 19th Division headquarters to Duztepe (Battleship Hill). This brought his command post closer to the centre of the wider defensive front, although he recorded that this location also had significant disadvantages, in particular that it was not possible from there to view the whole front and monitor any enemy operation emerging from the Anzac Cove area.

Command of the Anafarta Hills sector, overlooking Suvla Bay, was assigned to the newly arrived German officer, Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Willmer, a move Mustafa Kemal deplored on account of the German’s lack of local knowledge. This contrasted with Kemal’s much more positive view of the capabilities of the 9th Division commander, Colonel Hans Kannengiesser. Moreover, Kemal was critical of the confusion surrounding the allocation of the boundaries of the two commands: he disapproved of the division of the Sazlidere area into two command zones because he believed it was strategically crucial, and hence should be kept under a single command. His misgivings were prescient: this was to be the route used by New Zealand troops in their successful, albeit brief, assault on the heights at Chunuk Bair.

By the first week in August, General Otto Liman von Sanders, German commander of the 5th Army, had settled on a deployment of his force from north to south. The main feature of this deployment was that the force was fully stretched to cover as many eventualities as possible, as had occurred at the time of the original allied landings in April. Underlying this was his concern, which some commentators have described as an ‘obsession’, about the consequences of an attack in the north at Bulair (on the Gulf of Saros–Bolayir isthmus) – just as he had been concerned about this in April. This led to further disquiet at the supreme Ottoman Army Headquarters in Istanbul about von Sanders’s tactical deployment of his divisions to cover a possible landing at Bulair. The Turkish commanders had not been happy with the effects of such a deployment in April. They felt the defences then could easily have failed, and the same situation seemed to be developing again. They wanted larger forces deployed near the coast to cover potential enemy landing beaches.[4]

Von Sanders resisted such pressure – at least, in the short term – but by doing so he again delayed deploying a fuller defence force in the Anzac sector. His deployment, which was to have an immediate impact on events as they unfolded in early August, was as in Table 9.

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